Big goals, big dreams, big habits, overnight transformations…I’m sick of it all.
It’s loud, ego-driven, and not accessible to people like us. What’s made a huge difference in my life is small habits that I do for me and keep quiet. With the right stack of habits you can reasonably change your life in a year.
Here are the best quiet habits (none of them are obvious).
Choose your biggest fear and punch it in the face
My original writing mentor used to work in the mines in Perth, Australia as a snake handler (and he was scared of snakes).
To get the job he got put in a room full of snakes and had to fight his way out.
When he passed the test, he got to spend his days putting his arm into black holes looking for snakes. He never got over his fear but he sure as hell harnessed it.
My biggest fear used to be eating.
Why? Because I suffered an eating disorder for most of my life. As a kid, my dad would rush me in the morning to eat my toast, so I created stress around eating.
Later in life, every time I got stressed, this trauma came back to haunt me. It caused me to go from 132.277 lb to 220.462 lb and back down to 154.324 lb.
In 2011, I decided to kick this fear in the butt. It became the catalyst for a huge transformation that forever changed my life.
My self-talk went like this: “If I can beat a life-long eating disorder, what else can I do that I don’t think is possible?”
Turns out….anything.
Face your biggest fear.
Take the event that caused you so much pain and turn it into inspiration
I don’t give a crap what you’ve done in life, we’ve all experienced painful events.
Vitalik Buterin was born in 1994 in Russia. At 6 years old he moved to Canada. In 2007 he became obsessed with a PC computer game called World of Warcraft. For 3 years he was hooked. All day, every-damn-day.
Vitalik had a warlock character in the game who he loved as much as his father. One day the game's creator, Blizzard, removed the damage feature from his character.
He cried himself to sleep.
Days later he quit playing the game forever. That’s when he discovered he hated centralized tech businesses.
Next, he started writing for a Bitcoin website for a mediocre $1.50 an hour. Crypto projects started taking over his life. But all of them pissed him off because they were nothing but apps. No one built an ecosystem a.k.a. an applications layer.
This inspired Vitalik to create the blockchain technology, Ethereum. The emotion and pain from his Warcraft gaming days led to a breakthrough, which is now a technology worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
Jerry Seinfeld is a famous, controversial comedian.
Early in his career he got banned by Mitzi Shore from The Comedy Store, a well-known venue for up and coming comedians.
This hurt his career. It caused a lot of pain.
To fight back he created his own path and ended up creating the popular tv show Seinfeld. When he got rich off the show he bought a house near Mitzi. Every day he’d drive past her house in his Porsche while she was outside and wave to her.
She had to live with the mistake of banning Jerry for the rest of her life.
That inspiration was the kick in the butt he needed to build his own thing instead of always asking permission to get on stage at The Comedy Store.
The same happened to me in 2019.
I got fired by a boss who I thought was a friend.
It was a spectacular failure. The public firing and backlash afterward created enormous drama.
I went from announcing my new job on LinkedIn in front of hundreds of 1000s of followers, to trying to hide the fact I was unemployed.
The pain led me to write more and that writing has now reached over 1B people.
The pain also forced me to start an online business instead of working for other people.
Take the pain in your life and turn it into a daily habit that inspires others. The comeback will be epic and your resume will never look the same again.
Bet on yourself every day
Too many people are full of doubt.
They have no confidence in themselves and everything they’ve learned in their life. So, instead of betting on themselves, they become a bet in someone else’s machine, where they control the rules and incentives.
This leads to people-pleasing and asking for permission. It’s a modern day form of slavery, where a big boss says “Jump Eddie!” and you go “How high, sir?”
Override the programming and start taking bets on yourself. It starts with a side hustle, but it can bleed into bizarre areas like your love life.
When I was single I thought my dumbo big ears and pimply back made me disgusting to the opposite s*x, so I got no s*x.
Then an overweight, chain-smoking, 55 year old lady I worked with showed me photos of her literally having s*x with 20 year old plumbers with 6-packs. From that day onwards I started betting on myself. My confidence exploded.
That’s how I met my now supermodel wife (lol).
If you’re going to bet on anything then it may as well be yourself.
Spend 1 hour a day working on your side hustle
This sounds like such a Twitter bro thing to say.
It sounds like overworking and burnout. Hear me out. If you’re busy working a job or running a traditional business like a clothing shop, you have no time. You’re #busy.
So you’ve gotta start somewhere, right?
The smallest place to start is with 1-hour a day. It’s not gonna blow up your day but it has the power to help you see a different world.
The point isn’t to be productive, it’s to get addicted to your side hustle.It’s to do an hour a day for a month or a year and go, “F*ck, this is exactly what’s missing from my life.” Side hustles are the transition from BS work to real work you become obsessed with and would happily do for free.
A side hustle isn’t a hobby though. Why?
Because adding money to a side hustle is what forces you to become useful. It’s how you use your creativity to make something that’ll outlive you.
When you remove money all you have is weak passion to drive you. And often it’ll drive you off a cliff because you’ll become one of those romantic starving artist types who thinks their work is good when it actually sucks ass.
Work 1 hour a day on a side hustle. As it grows you will grow. Then add another hour a day and so on until it takes over your life. Then quit the dumb work for the work you’re now addicted to like a crack addict.
Do the hard thing 1000 times before you make your first complaint
Habits by themselves aren’t enough.
The ones that change your life require you to do hard things. Hard things only have payoffs if you do them thousands of times. In the process, though, rejection and failure will take over your life.
The frustration will be enormous.
When most people reach the plateau of doing a habit 1000s of times and not yet getting a reward, they resort to complaining and blaming. It’s human nature. The habit to practice instead is to do hard things and refuse to complain.
If it’s not hard, it’s too easy. Easy = Bullsh*t.
Start every day by letting ideas flow through you without a phone
Creativity is life-changing.
The best way to let ideas flow through you is to start the morning by writing. Your phone must not be present … or notifications will replace your creativity.
When ideas flow through you it feels amazing. It makes you proactive instead of reactive. And it has the potential to help others. These writing sessions are when breakthroughs happen because you start to link dots in your head.
Let writing take over your life. Write down everything. Dare to share it in public.
Read more books than you watch TV shows
TV is for entertainment, books are for learning.
If you spend too much time in entertainment mode you become dull, distracted and lifeless. TV is programming for our minds. But most of it is bad programming.
It’s one reason why I may never let my kid watch Disney movies & tv shows. A lot of the twisted values they’re giving kids are the opposite of what I want my kiddo to learn.
There’s something about books that’s honest. People who don’t read are stupid – and there’s no nice way to say it. We all could do with more reading.
Reading is soul food for the mind.
Spend time finding your obsession (not passion/interest/hobby)
A 9-5 job is a brilliant distraction machine.
It helps us forget our dreams – not in an evil way though. Many of us honestly haven’t found that one thing we’re obsessed with and want to do forever.
That’s not the problem.
The problem is we don’t make it a habit to explore our curiosity and experiment every day so it’ll lead us to find our obsession.
Force yourself to become curiosity-led. Fall down rabbit holes. Dare to explore hidden paths outside of your job. Notice what makes you curious.
Burn your shopping lists
Shopping lists are where financial freedom goes to die.
They suck the money out of your wallet like a Dyson vacuum cleaner, and place your hard-earned money in the hands of some lifeless corporation.
You don’t need 99% of the stuff you desire.
Once you come to that realization, like I have, all that’s left is money for utility bills, beans, rice, and maybe a few vegetables (I’m vegan).
Tell the BMW car salesman to F off, then stack F U money like Barbara Streisand.
Join a group of misfits who dare to be part of the top 1% in their field
It’s easier to change in a group of like-minded people with a similar goal.
The most successful thing I’ve ever built is a community obsessed with writing and making money online. It’s not for everyone but for those who eat, sleep, and live this obsession it’s a life-saver. Why?
Because finding your tribe online is hard, and free communities suck balls. Once you find your group of misfits you can work together daily and join the top 1% in whatever field you want to succeed.
When you’re with your tribe the world makes sense. When you’re outside of your tribe people think you’re a weirdo. They’ll say “You’ve changed.” Good.
“Life is so much simpler when you stop explaining yourself to people and just do what works for you.” – Ankur Warikoo
See every risk as an opportunity
Whatever you fear is often just False Evidence Appearing Real.
A habit to adopt is to start seeing risks as opportunities. But sometimes a decision won’t look like a risk. Instead, a decision just makes you feel cautious. It’s in these moments you must override your hidden fear and say yes.
The feeling of caution is a sign you’re playing it small – you’re being less than the person you could be. Risk = Growth
Make big decisions in a high-energy state
Decisions carve out our path in life.
So making good decisions is crucial. The challenge is a lot of us make big decisions in low-energy states, so we get piss-poor outcomes.
The best time to make decisions is after vigorous exercise or a good night’s sleep. You’ll think clearer and consider the pros & cons in a better way.
Stop making decisions at the end of a workday when you’re exhausted.
Tell me which of these quiet habits you loved the most and why in the comments.
I send this email weekly. If you would also like to receive it, join the 113,000+ other smart people who absolutely love it today.
👉 If you enjoy reading this post, feel free to share it with friends! Or feel free to click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏
It may be difficult to punch a spider in the face, but I'll give it a go. All joking aside there's some great advice here.
Write every morning; that's what I need to do.
Such a valuable set of propositions, thank you.